


May These Memories Lead Us Home

by catlike



Series: Hope is the Thing with Feathers [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Intended as a sequel to The Symbolism of Owls, Post-Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent, but can be read as a stand-alone, whouffaldi, whouffle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:02:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23989333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catlike/pseuds/catlike
Summary: Once, he heard a story from a weathered old woman under some golden alien sky, that the things you love always find a way back to you in the end. And it is only a fairy tale, a shot in the dark, one odd in a billion.And yet he hopes.A post-Hell Bent AU.
Relationships: The Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald, The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Clara Oswin Oswald, Twelfth Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald, Twelfth Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald
Series: Hope is the Thing with Feathers [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1728448
Comments: 35
Kudos: 147





	May These Memories Lead Us Home

Clara Oswald is lying dead on Trap Street, and Clara Oswald is alive, somewhere out there, living in the space between heartbeats. There are so many places in the world she could possibly be, but her flat isn’t bound to be one of them, and yet the Doctor finds himself there anyway.

And he doesn’t know why.

For a moment he just stands there, right in the middle of her living room, his black boots sinking into the beige carpet, feeling at a loss for why his unconscious muscle memory would land the TARDIS there.

And then he remembers:

It’s _Wednesday._

The two-word thought is something like a sucker punch, or like being sucked into space with no suit on. It is mind-reeling and breath-stealing, and it shatters him, swallows him, and around him, the room spins as the realization circles around and around in his mind to rhythm of his heartbeats. 

_It’s Wednesday. It’s Wednesday. It’s Wednesday._

”Of course,” he says, and he sighs, runs a hand over his face and closes his eyes. “Stupid, stupid old Doctor.”

Where else in the universe could he possibly end up? Wednesdays were _Clara’s_ days, and old habits were hard to break. He cannot remember the color of her hair or the cadence of her voice, but he remembers other things, like an Ice Warrior on a submarine and (apparently) the address of her flat and the fact that he must’ve loved her very, very much.

Which is why he stays in her flat that she’ll never come back to, and tries to reconstruct an image of the girl he once knew. 

He starts with what’s in front of him, his eyes scanning shelf after shelf along her living room wall, trying to learn what he can about one Miss Clara Oswald. She was ridiculously short, he decides, from the placement of the items on her shelves. Her head couldn’t have come up much past the slope of his shoulders. But she was obviously well-read, judging by the weathered pages and worn spines on her myriad of books. _And_ , he remembers significantly, as his eyes land on a bright white ceramic figurine, she had collected owls.

He stares at the ceramic, and a memory niggles somewhere in a dark corner of his mind of the day she brought that first owl knickknack home. The memory is fuzzy, all sort of soft and hazy, and he feels like he’s a sailor on a ship in a storm-swept sea, trying to see a lighthouse’s beacon through clouds of fog. But the fog is too thick, the waves too high, and he can’t remember exactly what she’d told him or what he’d said back.

But he knows the memory is important to him, somehow. And he thinks that maybe it was important to the both of them.

And maybe that’s enough for the plan he’s forming in his mind.

Once, he heard a story, from a weathered old woman under some golden alien sky, that the things you love always find a way back to you in the end. And it is a fairy tale, a shot in the dark, just a nearly nonsensical spark of hope.

Hope, he knows, can be the worst thing.

But, but, _but_ :

Hope can also be the best thing. 

And the thing about it is, it’s impossible to resist. So he raises his sonic screwdriver and points it at the owl, letting a glowing blue light wash over the white, putting a tracking imprint on it. The sonic hums, locking onto her leftover memories and fingerprints, and should Clara ever (anywhere, in all of time and space, just by chance) find and hold her owl again, the sonic will glow red and lead him to her.

So he finishes getting a tracking lock on the ceramic owl, puts it back on the shelf...

...and he _hopes_.

#

Somewhere out there, Clara Oswald is lying lifeless on Trap Street.

But right now, Clara Oswald (one-hundred-and-twelve and the pilot of her very own TARDIS) is also in a shop on the Embarcadero in mid-century San Francisco.

The idea that her body is somewhere out there, lying beneath a cold tombstone should probably bother her, she thinks, but it doesn’t. Not really. She’d already jumped into the Doctor’s time stream, after all, and has long since come to terms with the idea that the universe is filled with the many graves of Clara Oswald. 

All that matters is that, right at this very moment, this version of herself isn't in one yet.

Which is why she’s enjoying herself now, browsing a little, kitschy shop in nineteen-fifty-nine, enjoying the quiet break. 

(She’s just been busy saving an entire species of luminous fish in thirty-thirty-five and needs a relaxing change of pace.

Plus, the shopping prices are quite cheaper in the fifties.)

And that’s when she comes across a pair of owl salt-and-pepper shakers.

They are adorable and admittedly tacky, but they match the retroness of her faux TARDIS diner perfectly and Clara can’t help but stop and stare at them. She’d collected owls back in her own, original timeline and silly old habits were hard to break, even after years flying around all of time and space.

Clara picks up one of the owl shakers, runs her thumb over it, and thinks of the first owl figurine she’d brought home oh so many years ago, with it’s white ceramic feathers that nearly looked like furrowed brows and the odd, almost alien expression on its painted face. And then she thinks of _him_ , because of course she does. The only reason why she’d even started collecting owls in the first place was because they reminded her of the Doctor, with his funny, angry owl-like eyes and his velvet coat that floated behind him like a pair of wings. 

The one owl she can never have. 

Because that is the thing about her and him, they loved each other a little too fiercely, pushed the universe a little too far, and this is the price they paid: she is here, breathless with too many memories of him, and he is elsewhere, living with none of her at all.

Slowly, the owl salt shaker in her hand starts to gloss over and blur, it’s outline all wavy and watery, and Clara has to take a second to purse her lips and shut her eyes and tell herself very sternly not to cry.

(The thing is, she can no longer breathe and her heart doesn’t beat, but she can still shed tears. 

She doesn’t know if that bit of leftover humanity is a gift or a curse from the Time Lords.)

And then she shakes her head, clears her throat, and takes the miniature owls to the cash register.

Because decades of agelessly sailing the stars hasn’t done a thing to lessen her fondness for owls.

#

The Doctor is in Clara’s old room on the TARDIS, and he keeps finding owls. They are tucked away, hidden in corners and locked in drawers and pushed behind other knickknacks, so inconspicuous that he hadn’t even noticed them at first glance, but now he sees nothing _but_ them.

There is a painted porcelain owl standing guard over a stack of silver rings, a discarded phone charm of an owl with outstretched wings, and then, sitting atop her nightstand, as if it was meant to keep vigilance over her while she slept, there is a tiny, grey owl with bright blue eyes. It is a plastic thing, a mere children’s toy, but obviously important to her. And as he picks it up and turns it over in his hands, he remembers it sitting atop the TARDIS console.

He cannot see Clara in his memories. Her silhouette is nothing but an indiscernible blur of colors, a nebula in the outline of a body, and her voice is all distorted, but he still remembers that, at one point, she’d pointed to an owl and said:

“He looks like you.”

And then, later, later, _later_ :

“I love owls.” 

His usually steady hands falter at the memory and the owl slips through his fingers, falling to the floor, and he knows he should be moving, reaching down to pick it up, but his hands are frozen and his hearts are hammering and he’s replaying her words in his head, over and over and over again.

When she said she’d loved owls, he wonders, had she meant that she loved _him_? Had she been telling him all this time and he’d just been too deaf and too blind to take notice?

The thought is too much. It is gut-wrenching and raging and and all-consuming, roaring in his mind like an exploding supernova that just won’t stop, and he sinks down to the floor and puts his head in his hands and tries not to scream.

She _loved_ him. She told him right to his face and he hadn’t heard it.

And the thing is, he no longer knows the sound of her laugh or the curve of her lips, but he remembers how he feels about her. He remembers that he loved her, loved her enough to die every day for four-and-a-half billion years. Loved her enough to burn the universe and unravel time, and he knows that she was some sort of guiding force - a North Star and a touchstone and an anchor and something that meant _home_.

And she _still_ means home. 

He just has to find his way back to her.

#

Once upon a time, little Clara Oswald had clutched a book about one-hundred-and-one places to see and dreamed of going to them all.

And now Clara Oswald is over two-hundred and has been to them all and then more.

She’s seen the birth and death of stars and the seven wonders of the ancient world back when they were new, she’s seen the Grand Canyon on Earth and the one up on Dreaminx, and more than just seen the universe, she’s _saved_ it.

(Thousands and thousands of times. Because in all of time and space, there are Doctors running around with countless faces, but there is also _her_ , and she is a one-woman storm, sweeping in and saving lives before the Doctor’s ever needed.)

And right now she is standing in the middle of a festival on a starship she’s just saved from crashing, and she’s surrounded by a sea of partiers and entertainers. There are brightly glowing balloons and dancers on stilts and jugglers that hover, and off in the corner, there’s a puppet show being watched by the children with rapt attention. 

And Clara turns toward it, steps closer, like it’s slowly reeling her in on a string. 

(She gets closer, you see, because the puppet being used in the show is an owl.

It is a black owl, and Clara almost expects to see a flash of red in the lining of its wings.)

By the time she gets near enough to hear, she’s missed most of the story, but from what she’s pieced together, it was about something that was lost.

“See?” the owl puppet says in a gravelly voice. “The things you love always find a way back to you in the end.” 

And Clara wonders if it’s true.

#

The tracker on his screwdriver is still running, and sometimes the Doctor thinks that it will always be running, that he’ll spend an eternity chasing after phantoms all hoping they’ll turn out to be her. It was a mere chance, after all, one odd in a billion. He is waiting for one particular ceramic owl to find its way back to one particular girl, and he well knows the vastness of time and the sheer magnitude of the universe and how there’s billions upon billions of galaxies and myriads of stars and countless possibilities of where in all of time and space she could be.

But he can’t bring himself to turn the tracker off. 

After all, she’s died before and he’s always found her. Again and again and _again_. 

All he needs to do is find her just one more time.

#

Clara Oswald is winding her way through an alien bazaar. She doesn’t look a day over thirty, but she’s well over three-hundred.

And she’s about to receive a gift from the past.

Because as she’s weaving through all the brightly colored booths and carts full of trinkets, she finds herself in front of a stall selling antiques, and in that stall, sitting on a stack of crates right at the level of her eye, is a small, white ceramic owl.

It is old and weathered, its paint is scratched and its horns are cracked, but it looks exactly like the very first owl she got, so, so, so many years ago.

(Clara has no way of knowing yet, but after her death on Trap Street, the ceramic owl and her other belongings were packed up and donated and put in a thrift shop and bought as gifts and eventually passed on in wills as antiques until the owl now sits here, some hundreds of years later, miles and miles and miles away from Earth, on an alien planet, simply waiting for her to find it again.

She also has no idea that somewhere out there, the man she loves is spending an eternity tracking it, desperately hoping he can follow it back to her.)

Carefully, Clara picks the owl up, smiling at its glowering beak and the grumpy look in its eyes. 

“It’s a very old antique,” the alien vendor tells her as she runs her fingers over the carved feathers. “Made in the form of some Earthen creature.”

“It’s an owl,” Clara tells them, handing over her currency.

“An _owl_ ,” the vendor repeats, carefully rolling the odd word over its blue tongue. “What’s an owl?”

Clara smiles, holds the ceramic close, and she thinks.

She thinks of the shade of his eyes and the sound of his voice and the rare curve of his smile and the way he made her laugh.

And at over three-hundred years-old, she’s earned the right to be a sentimental old fool, so she smiles and says:

“It’s something wonderful.”

#

Clara Oswald is on a far-off distant planet, purchasing back her very own owl in a marketplace, and at the very same time, the Doctor is hundreds and thousands of light years away up in space.

And the tracker on the sonic screwdriver suddenly turns bright red.

#

He tries to follow the tracker to her, but the time zone and coordinates are always changing, the numbers and eras she’s in shifting and blinking away, the temporal displacement of two different TARDISES making it hard to get the tracking and timing exactly right. He finds he’s always landing just a step behind her, a day or a decade too late to reach her.

But whenever he lands, he always knows he’s in the right spot, because the traces of her are all around; in fresh sonic scorches on metal or in ancient songs about a girl who is the savior of a thousand worlds or in bedtime stories for children about a warrior queen who came down from the stars just to rescue them. 

She is everywhere and she is nowhere, and nothing feels more bittersweet.

“She was scary,” one small child tells him, when he’s landed just an hour too late. “But she was kind. She drew a picture with me. Do you want to see it?”

And the child is confused as to why the Doctor looks like he’s about to both laugh and cry over a drawing of an owl holding a guitar.

#

Clara Oswald has just liberated a prisoner’s of war camp in a futuristic rainforest, and now she’s collapsed on a stool in her faux TARDIS diner.

There’s mud on her shoes and scratches on her skin, but she’s laughing, wired and exhilarated and high off her adventure, and as she laughs she places a small brown owl one of the newly free prisoners carved from the root of a tree for her onto the counter. 

She sits it right next to the old, weathered (terribly antique by now) ceramic owl she’s got sitting on the counter, and she thinks of _him_ and wishes he could’ve been there with her, and she smiles into the quiet darkness, and says:

“You would’ve loved it, Doctor.”

(And she pats the owl on the head, and she has no idea that somewhere out there, the Doctor’s desperately trying to use it to follow her home.)

#

When he follows the tracker and lands on Lumia Five, it’s like he’s entering the aftermath of a battle. There are white ashes dusting the ground like fresh snowfall and little burning red embers that look like fallen stars and sweeping plumes of smoke curling up against the clouds.

But all around him the alien villagers are cheering. They are hugging and kissing and singing, and as a group of alien children run by, screaming at the sheer joy of being alive, the Doctor grabs one of them by the shoulders.

“There was a girl here, wasn’t there?” The Doctor asks. 

“She saved us,” the child tells him excitedly. “The sky was burning, but then she _saved_ us.”

“What was she like?” The Doctor asks, desperate and proud and eager to hear. “Please, tell me, what was she like?”

And the child grins and says, “She was _impossible_.”

#

The year is twenty-fourty-nine and there’s a comet about to light up the Nevada night, so Clara’s landed her TARDIS on a dusty desert hill under a clear patch of sky.

The comet only passes once every fifty-seven years. It is a once in a lifetime thing.

(Unless you’re ageless or a time traveler, of course, of which Clara is both. She’s just been back to see it in nineteen-ninety-two and is in the mood for a rerun.) 

And when Clara hears the soft ding of her diner’s door, meaning someone’s walked into it, she figures that it is simply another mistake. Nothing out of the ordinary.

She is wrong on both counts. 

Because who she sees in her diner stops her right in her tracks, and it’s like the world‘s stopped spinning and time has stood still, because _he_ is there, standing in her faux diner. The sight of him again is both breathtaking and heartbreaking, intoxicating and devastating, because he is not hers, not anymore, but he is beautiful. 

(And Clara....Clara has seen nebulas that burn color into dark skies and suns that sweep patterns of light and glittering, curving constellations and diamond filled caverns and nothing, nothing, _nothing_ compares to the elation of seeing him again.)

“Owls,” he says softly, and for the first time, she notices that he has not bothered to turn toward her, that he is concentrated instead on the collection of owls she’s got on the counter.

Clara stares at his side silhouette, but he doesn’t even spare her a glance. He still doesn't know her, she realizes. Maybe he’d just wandered in on a whim. It was the night of a historic comet, after all. She’d been reckless and foolhardy, thinking she could be a part of history and not ever run into him. 

And once again, Clara silently, violently curses the entire planet of Gallifrey for making her ageless but leaving her with the ability to cry, because there’s a lump in her throat and there are tears stinging the corners of her eyes. And she’s torn between drinking in the sight of him and closing her eyes because it’s been over three-hundred years since she’s seen him and even after all this time she’s not sure she can handle another goodbye.

“You collect owls,” he says, interrupting her internal storm of thoughts, and his voice manages to sound both matter-of-fact and full of wonder.

“I love owls,” she says quietly.

And at her words, he turns toward her. His gaze first falls at her feet, and then slowly, (slowly, slowly, _slowly_ , as if he’s trying to scan a blueprint for a secret or piece together a puzzle) he looks up at her face. 

And when his bright blue eyes lock onto her dark brown ones, it feels like everything has all come down to this moment, that maybe timelines changed and the universe rearranged and all that tragedy and heartbreak happened just to bring them both back to here, to now, to this very moment.

(She should not dare to hope, she thinks. She is hundreds of years old and she knows that hope is a dangerous thing, and yet she finds herself standing there, hoping and pleading and wanting and wishing.)

And then, in a rough Scottish voice that’s uncharacteristically, desperately, questioning and quiet, he says, “Clara?”

He is asking for confirmation. He is asking for information that once sent the universe burning. Clara stares, swallows hard.

“Dangerous question,” she says, and she means it. 

But then he says, “What’s wrong with dangerous?”

And the next thing she knows, he is running to her, hugging her, his arms coming around her in a way they haven’t since Trap Street, and she is falling into him, collapsing against his chest and clutching onto his coat and swearing she’ll never let go, not ever, not again. His face is buried in her hair, and against her temple she hears him murmur something that sounds like her name, over and over again, and she gasps out a sob, tears falling onto the dark velvet of his coat. And for the first time, she’s happy that the Time Lords left her with the ability to cry. Because this...this is both joy and peace, exhilaration and serenity, every second of happiness wrapped up in something that utterly, unquestionably feels _right_ , because falling into his arms feels like coming _home_.

“Clara,” he whispers against her hair. “My Clara.”

And she thinks that sometimes the things you love really do find their way back to you.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote Part I, The Symbolism of Owls, after seeing screencaps posted by (the amazing and eagle-eyed) chipsandcoffee showing that Clara had a small owl statue sitting on a shelf in her flat. I had intended it to be a stand-alone fic, but then (the awesome and inspirational) penumbral_spaces left me an comment saying that their personal headcanon for my fic was that, when Clara got her original owl statue back, the Doctor used it to track her. And so then I obviously had to write a sequel. This spontaneously started and concluded series is now named Hope is the Thing with Feathers, after the Emily Dickenson poem as a nod to both the hope and owl theme.
> 
> If you like what I wrote, come find me on Tumblr (username: clara-oswin-oswald), where a good portion of my posts are dedicated solely to screaming about The Doctor and Clara.


End file.
